There is no other way to put it. The start of this year’s Pride Month was painful. We can’t stop thinking of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and of too many before and after them. Witnessing modern-day lynch mobs during a pandemic is soul-crushing. Do not be tempted to say the upheaval happening now is “unique” or “unprecedented.” Because it is not. The US has centuries of history inflicting violence and death on Black bodies. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his “The Other America” speech, “the riot is the language of the unheard.” And the US has not listened since the days of slavery and settler colonialism. So the protests and riots rage on. As we continue to fight against white supremacy and the carceral state, we must repeat: Black lives matter.

Again: Black lives matter.

Black lives, of course, include Black queer lives. Like the life of Black trans man Tony McDade. That’s why this Pride Month, we’re giving special attention to our titles by and/or about Black queer folks. Any of these would be a perfect choice to Black out the New York Times bestseller list.

Get your Black queer read on!

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How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

“One of the very best reasons to listen to Black women is the fact that doing so will better equip you to understand the complexity of oppression—and what we can do to challenge it.”
—Crystal Marie Fleming

Download the readers’ guide for discussion.

Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color

“There is no question that the shroud of invisibility around Black women’s and women of color’s experiences of police violence has been irrevocably lifted in the post-Ferguson moment and movement. We can no longer be complicit in the notion that we can achieve safety through policing.”
—Andrea J. Ritchie

Download the readers’ guide for discussion.

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

“She was a Black lesbian woman born into the established Black middle class who became a Greenwich Village bohemian leftist married to a man, a Jewish communist songwriter. She cast her lot with the working classes and became a wildly famous writer. She drank too much, died early of cancer, loved some wonderful women, and yet lived with an unrelenting loneliness. She was intoxicated by beauty and enraged by injustice. I could tell these stories as gossip. But I hope they will unfold here as something much more than that.”
—Imani Perry

Notes of a Native Son

“The idea of white supremacy rests simply on the fact that white men are the creators of civilization (the present civilizatioin, which is the only one that matters; all previous civilizations are simply ‘contributions’ to our own) and are therefore civilization’s guardians and defenders.”
—James Baldwin

Soul Serenade: Rhythm, Blues & Coming of Age Through Vinyl

“This burning curiosity about other boys, I figured, would pass . . . . Whatever it was, I didn’t know what to do with it, and I told myself that the feelings would all fade away. The dashikis and clumsy Afrocentric rhetoric would disguise the desire, distract me from it, or maybe erase it altogether.”
—Rashod Ollison

Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

“Unapologetic is a call to queer our movement practices, and honor the contributions of Black feminist and LGBT movements to the Black radical tradition.”
—Charlene A. Carruthers